On the 21st of this month I will travel to
Providence, RI and Boston, MA to speak at Brown and MIT about my work on
Marx. I genuinely believe that my work
is unique. No one else, to my knowledge,
has so much as asked how one might unite the literary and mathematical dimensions
of Marx’s theory of capitalist exploitation, let alone attempted to do it, as I
have. But alas, my work has received
very little attention. Brooding on this
has put me in mind of a story from sixty years ago.
In 1956, when I was a twenty-two year old doctoral student
in the Harvard Philosophy Department finishing up my dissertation, the Graduate
Philosophy Club invited a retired Michigan professor, Roy Wood Sellars, to
speak. Sellars, father of the much
better known Wilfred Sellars, was unimaginably old. He must have been five or six years younger than
I am now. He delivered a long,
plaintive, cranky, complaining speech, the message of which was that his
Mid-Western version of causal realism had never received a fair hearing in the
profession because the East Coast version of causal realism dominated the
journals. We all sat there in stunned
silence, desperately trying to remember what causal realism is.
And here I am, preparing to travel north from Chapel Hill to
complain that my version of Marx has not received the attention it deserves
because Analytical Marxism is all the rage.
I hope that in half a century, when those young folks are my
age and tell this story, they will be kind.
If an old person (I'm old myself) complains to young people about how the world has not recognized their worth, they're finished. Young people still imagine that the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong, bread to the wise, riches to men of understanding and favor to men of skill: that the world is somehow fair.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if there were a moment when someone who has studied Marx all his life (as you have) might find a bit of recognition, it's now: post 2008. It's evident that the 2008 crisis has shaken capitalist hegemony: that's why another old guy, Bernie Sanders, is doing so well, why still another old guy, Jeremy Corbyn, now leads the Labor Party and why yet another old guy, David Harvey, now sells a lot of books about Marxism.
So I imagine that you'll do better than you imagine with your talk.
I love your work on Marx. It's both rigorous and insightful, which is a rare combination. I have no doubt that young philosophers will be reading your work on Marx for many, many years.
ReplyDeleteAnalytical Marxism?.....Anwar Shaikh has something interesting to say about that in the Second Lecture based on his new book....http://www.hgsss.org/anwar-m-shaikh-capitalism-competition-conflict-and-crises/ Around about minute 57....the "most bizarre" of bizarre ideas......
ReplyDeleteAt a minimum I haven't let a semester go by without making my students read In Defense of Anarchism.
ReplyDelete